Would less academically able pupils be better off with a Sixties-style vocational education? Cassandra Jardine reports

Anyone who has trouble locating a plumber or who finds it depressing that cooking means putting packages in a microwave will be glad that Channel 4 has decided, once again, to send Britain's teenagers back to school.

Last year, the documentary series That'll Teach 'Em took 30 A-grade GCSE students back to a Fifties grammar school to see how they fared with a strict O-level syllabus.

Unsurprisingly, many of those who got starry results in GCSE could not cope with the grammatical rigour and recall of facts involved in O-levels, and failed their exams.

Later this month, the series returns and, this time, will take 30 predicted C-, D- and E-grade pupils – 15 boys and 15 girls from comprehensives all over the country – back to a reconstruction of a secondary modern in the Sixties to see how they cope with an old-fashioned vocational education.

At the end of the series, the results of the pupils' exams in woodwork, metalwork and domestic science will be compared with their GCSE results. But the most interesting aspect of the programme will be whether they thrive on learning practical skills in a disciplined environment.

For the past 10 days, the pupils have been ensconced in the Sixties wing of the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. There, they will face waxed toilet paper, kippers for lunch, and lessons with no-nonsense teachers such as Cornelia Welham, whom producer Simon Rockell describes as "Margaret Rutherford crossed with a Rottweiler".

Roger Fawcett, the headmaster of this summer school, notes with glee that some are finding it hard not to question authority or put their elbows on the desk and to keep their ties done up properly. Early bed-times, lots of healthy exercise, scrubbed faces and lessons on "community" with Scouts and Guides are the order of the day.

In keeping with the times, girls will be steered towards childcare and cleaning – to prepare them for marriage and motherhood – while aspiring Jamie Olivers are barred from the kitchen and made to do metalwork. Without parents around to attack them, teachers are taking an entertainingly tough line with those whose behaviour or work falls short of required standards.

But there is a serious purpose, too. The experiment will show whether these less academic pupils are happier and more successful working with their hands than writing abstract essays. At a time when skills gaps are a matter of urgent concern, when the Tomlinson Report on the reform of the 14-19 curriculum is out for consultation, the question of how to motivate teenagers to take up hands-on work is high on the agenda.

Rockell, who used to be a teacher before going into television, sees hundreds of job applications from barely literate would-be programme makers who "don't want to work and aren't resourceful. Young people have huge expectations," he says. "They all want to be pet psychologists or earn fortunes in the City. A lot are deluded. They have a totally false sense of their own ability."

He knows that he may be pilloried again for having a right-wing agenda. Last year, after the disappointing O-level results were read out, he appeared on screen (in his guise as the school's history master) to supply some context, saying that this was the price of "accessibility for all" and that education then was "more productive, but less enjoyable". The message, however, was that O-levels were a better challenge for more intellectual pupils.

This year, he may get even more flak. If there is one aspect of our educational past that has been consigned to the dustbin of history with glee, it is the socially divisive secondary modern. And yet Rockell appears to have come to praise this hated instrument of educational apartheid.

"I have chosen to set the series in the Sixties," he explains, "not just because of the beehive hairdos and shocking pink lipstick, but because, by then, some of the better secondary moderns were beginning to get their act together. There were some very good ones, such as Lea Bank in Lancashire [run by Rhodes Boyson from 1961-66], where there were high expectations and good results. But by that stage, they were damned."

The system which gave the 20 per cent who passed the 11-plus a superior grammar school education and left the rest to feed on the scrap heap came out of the 1944 Butler Act. Of the 80 per cent who failed the exam, 10 per cent went to technical colleges and 70 per cent to secondary moderns.

There, they were housed in decaying buildings, taught by often unqualified teachers, given only a third of the funding per head of their contemporaries at grammar schools and barred from public exams.

The middle classes feared the system, lest their children should fail the 11-plus; the working classes saw it as a way to keep them in their place. Many emerged with no qualifications – only the top stream took CSEs – to become factory fodder, so, when the Labour Party came to power in 1964, Harold Wilson had to get rid of it.

Talking of "grammar schools for all", he floated the comprehensive system which came into being in the 1970s. Out went woodwork, metalwork and domestic science and in came modern languages and an academic approach to practical subjects that leaves many pupils baffled. When GCSEs were introduced in 1988, the last vestiges of learning through doing went, too.

We are left with a system whose failings can be seen most starkly when it comes to basic skills such as cooking. Recently, Prince Charles, Prue Leith and others have joined forces to decry the inability of today's young to boil an egg. Obesity rates are rising and many seem to consider a balanced meal to be pizza with doughballs or pasta followed by a Pop Tart. When they have enough money to buy a home of their own, they often spend thousands on a fancy kitchen but still live on take-aways.

Cherilyn Lloyd Jones, who is teaching domestic science at the Channel 4 school, has been appalled, but not surprised, by the incompetence of the 16-year-olds recruited for the programme. When she asked them to glaze Cornish pasties, they put a lump of lard on top. "Their parents can't cook," she says, "so there is no one, except sometimes grandparents, to teach them." As a food technology teacher with 30 years' experience at Brecon High School, she takes issue with the current syllabus.

"It's the industrial approach. We spend a lot of time on HACCP – hazard analysis and critical control points," she says. Instead of learning how to make biscuits, pupils are taught how to identify the moments in biscuit manufacture when microbes are most likely to multiply. Some of her colleagues, who teach the same course, are as incompetent as the children. "One gave a lesson on making Polo mint sandwiches," she says.

In their Sixties timewarp, the pupils are learning to follow recipes and grasp arcane arts such as kneading and rubbing in. Used to skipping the basics, the girls experiment with weird cake toppings before they have mastered a simple mixture of sugar and butter. At the moment, Lloyd Jones sees little prospect of any of them passing the final exam, in which they have to cook a two-course meal, set a table, arrange flowers and wire a plug, all in two and a half hours.

In business studies, Welham is teaching the teenagers to touch-type on old-fashioned typewriters using carbon paper and rubbers. "It's hard for them, but they will come out of this with dexterity they can use at computers," she says. She regrets the recent scrapping of the practical parts of the business studies courses that she teaches at GNVQ level at Bude Haven Community College.

"There used to be an option to run your own business. The students loved it. They washed cars, organised line dances and set up bring-and-buy sales. That option has gone now. The Government is so worried about being seen to be fair that they want exams which are the same everywhere and easy to mark."

When the boys made their first attempts at bricklaying and woodwork, the results were predictably disastrous. But despite having only four weeks to bring them to a standard of competence, Thomas Smith, who has taught the subjects for 22 years, is delighted to be getting down to basics.

In County Durham, where he lives, there is a "massive shortage" of carpenters and joiners and very few apprentice schemes. At Shotton Hall Comprehensive in Peterlee, where he normally teaches, he has little time for practicalities as the CDT course involves a whole range of subjects, most of them involving computers.

These teachers come to the secondary modern from a variety of backgrounds. Rockell went to a private boarding school. Fawcett scraped into the bottom stream of a grammar school and felt low in the school's hierarchy. Lloyd Jones just failed her 11-plus.

Although she feels she has always suffered from the "stigma", she suspects she did better in the top stream of a secondary modern than she would have done at the bottom of a grammar school. Welham ascribes her strong belief in discipline to her convent years, rather than the grammar school which followed. Smith felt discarded at his secondary modern but, aged 15, did an apprenticeship with British Steel, and later became a teacher.

Only Welham says she would go back to the old system, but all of them think that the vocational baby was thrown out with the bathwater when the system was scrapped. Now, the students they teach mostly want to go on to university, however ill-suited they are to it, often because there is no alternative.

"I had two students who wanted to be plumbers," says Welham, "but they couldn't find places at the local college. All of this talk about posh plumbers earning a fortune means the places are filled by mature students."

Clearly, the gender divides of the 1960s are not going to be reintroduced, nor the 11-plus. The skills taught in the 1960s may not be those needed now – though plumbing and electrical circuitry, carpentry and child care have not changed much.

Without winding back the clock, Tomlinson has floated the idea of vocational education from the age of 14 in specialist colleges. These would, unlike secondary moderns, be properly funded, but his ideas offend those who still believe that university is for all.

The demand for vocational courses still needs to be proved. If even one or two of the 30 students in That'll Teach 'Em discover that they would rather be a first-class bricklayer than a third-class television researcher, it could be good news.

That'll Teach 'Em begins on Channel 4 on August 17 at 9pm

Famous secondary modern pupils

Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop: Maude Allen Secondary Modern School for Girls, Littlehampton